Deakin Research Online Deakin University’s institutional research repository DDeakin Research Online Research Online This is the published version (version of record) of: Jacobs, John 2008, Perverse performances by skilful liars : Shakespeare's lago and Mamet's Billy and Mike, Double dialogues, no. 8, Summer 2007/08 : Art and Lies I, pp. 1-9. Available from Deakin Research Online: http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30017088 Reproduced with kind permission of the copyright owner. Double Dialogues - Issue Seven: On Space http://www.doubledialogues.com/archive/issue_eight/jacobs.html Issue Eight, Summer 2007/08 Art & Lies I home current issue archives gallery contact Return to Contents Perverse Performances by Skilful Liars: Shakespeare’s Iago and Mamet’s Billy and Mike John Jacobs Deakin University ‘Natural Faith’ Imagine there is a knock on the door of your office at the University. You call out ‘Come in’ and a student enters. She has a problem that she wants you, the lecturer, to help her with. You may not have seen her before, but if so there’s nothing strange about that, since over 200 students attend the lectures in this subject. Or perhaps it is a student not yet enrolled in the subject who wants to ask you about entry or timetable requirements. This is a very routine, pretty much everyday event in the life of most academics or tertiary teachers. The young woman is dressed just like most female students; she is polite and pleasant, slightly nervous and inarticulate, as many students are when they are in the lecturer’s office. There seems nothing suspicious about her at all. In her hand is a printed sheet that you are familiar with, a sheet about the lecture program that you are in charge of. Who is this person who has just entered your office? Is there any reason to believe that she is to any great extent not what she seems? Is it possible she is a liar, some kind of actor, not a University student at all, but in fact someone impersonating a student, possible she has been hired by someone with a grudge against you in order to make a fool of you in some way, or hired or engaged by someone who knows you have quite a lot of money at the moment so as in some way to begin a process of stealing that money from you? This is all most unlikely to be sure, but certainly not impossible, a situation recalling the words of P.G.Wodehouse’s Psmith, who warns us never to confuse these two things, the unlikely and the impossible. This is an essay about liars, liars in everyday life and liars in works of art, especially plays and film/television, the art forms with which I am most familiar. In the theatre and in film, we pay frequently to see, enjoy and to be seduced by role play, to ‘suspend disbelief’. We expect the performer to portray or pretend to be someone else (the character), to play a character which the performer herself or himself is not; and we, the audience, consent to this seduction. However, in life outside the theatre we tend to believe in the honesty of people; we prefer to think the best of them and, if their façade is honest, to assume that what lies beneath is equally so. Reflecting for a moment on the hypothetical example of the University lecturer described above: how many of us who were at the 2007 Double Dialogues (Lies - a Conference on Art) conference in Suva would be vulnerable in such everyday situations? I think most of us would be vulnerable; and considering the cases I am about to look at in the next few minutes, the moral of my paper is: keep a part of your mind highly sceptical at all times: trust no-one deeply until you know them very, very well; for, as Shakespeare’s Duncan 1 of 9 7/12/2009 11:24 AM Double Dialogues - Issue Seven: On Space http://www.doubledialogues.com/archive/issue_eight/jacobs.html suggests, there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. Philosophers quite frequently use the phrase ‘natural faith’ (as distinct from ‘supernatural faith’). The term comes from Thomas Aquinas (in his commentary on De Trinitate by Boethius), and Derrida revived the idea in an essay called "Faith and Knowledge". The idea is a simple one, as proposed by Derrida: I must extend a line of credit, as it were, to everyone and anyone merely in order for social commerce to take place, even if I suspect that I might be lied to. Without this ‘natural faith’ no relationship is viable; and so, of course, it is this ‘natural faith’ that makes deception possible. Deception, then, is predicated on natural faith. We simply do not have theoretical knowledge of the other person’s ideas, motivations, feelings, and so forth. I believe Othello falls less through anything to do with his own character, less for example through insecurity about his colour or about his sexuality, than through the natural faith which makes deception possible. Iago trades on the natural faith, not only of Othello but of all the other characters, on their inability to secure knowledge of the other person. House of Games Let us move now, not back to the office of our hypothetical University lecturer, but to another office. The scene is early in David Mamet’s film House of Games, and the office is the consulting rooms of a young psychiatrist, Dr. Margaret Ford, who has suddenly become very wealthy through having written a best-selling book (about ‘Compulsion and Obsession in Everyday Life’). A young man, Billy, who has been her patient for perhaps several weeks or maybe months, arrives at her rooms and tells her he fears for his life: he has gambling debts that he cannot pay and the man he owes the money to (the Mike of my paper’s sub-title) is going to kill him. She agrees to meet Mike and to seek to intercede on the young man’s behalf. She has in a trice fallen victim to a lie that will rob her of much of her newfound wealth, for Billy is not at all what he seems. Billy is a liar, an ‘actor’, a member of a group of criminals who have targeted Dr. Ford and are about to fleece her of her money through the power of deception. Once again the question is: is Dr. Ford seduced largely through this power, or is something akin to hubris on her part also involved? A kind of pride certainly seems to play a part. Most of us would probably agree that at successful moments in people’s lives they tend to be somewhat vulnerable, less clear in their thinking and more prone to bad judgment. In this case we can assume that ‘Mike’, ‘Billy’ and the other criminals would be on the lookout for such vulnerability and for any opportunity to exploit it. Ford is indeed depicted by Mamet as herself somewhat obsessive in her own life and attitude, and in the scene directly preceding the scene in the consulting room is spoken to firmly about this by a learned friend. Your book is a best seller, your income jumps up, people look at you differently, perhaps. This is confusing. Listen to me: Slow Down. The word hubris is usually translated as ‘overweening pride’, but is more precisely understood in the Greek context as the urge to escape the bonds that define us; such an urge we might associate with Dr. Ford’s obsessiveness. Now the film cuts to Billy’s visit to Dr. Ford’s consulting rooms, the visit to which I referred a moment ago: Billy What? Are you going to tell me I’m ‘entitled to my feelings…’? What does it…what the. hell. does. it. matter? (pause) Ford It matters if you’re going to cure yourself. Billy If I’m going to cure myself. And what do I do now? 2 of 9 7/12/2009 11:24 AM Double Dialogues - Issue Seven: On Space http://www.doubledialogues.com/archive/issue_eight/jacobs.html Ford What do you do now? You…. Billy No, no, what do I do today? What do I do tomorrow? Ford Today and tomorrow you say this: I am a compulsive gambler. The reasons for this … Billy Oh, maan…oh maan…I don’t know….what am I doing here…? Ford You’re here to take control of your life. Billy I lost, what do you care maan, you’re rich, you’re comfortable, you got your goddam book you wrote, you don’t do dick, you don’t do nothing, maan, it’s all a con game, you do nothing. You say you want to help? You want to help…? Help me with this. (He produces a small, nickelled automatic pistol) Help me with this, if you can, cause if not I got to use it. And then, a bit later, Billy says What do you think this is? Some ‘dream’? Maan, you’re living in the dream, your ‘questions,’ cause there. is. a. real. World. (pause) And then Ford You give me the gun and I will help you. He hands her the gun. Billy I just lost twenty-five thousand dollars. That I do not have. And if I do not pay it by tomorrow they are going to kill me. Now: what kind of help is your damn promise now? (Mamet, 1985:10-11) Very soon after this the action shifts to a location at which Dr.